Integrate TeamCity with Git Flow

18 July 2017

Git Flow is a very strict branching model, which is often used in projects that adpoting the feature branches strategy. It provides some command lines to help the developer to save time in switching on/off branches. The branch names follow a set of convention, such as feature/*** for feature branches, bugfix/*** for bug fix branches, develop as the trunk branch and master as the production branch. It’s very easy to config the CI tools to monitoring the branch changes, and kick off the build-test-package process. We use TeamCity as the CI tool to explain how to configure CI pipelines for different kinds of branches.

Configure pipelines

Configure pipeline for Master

Create a project in TeamCity, and configure the repo Url.

Configure the project name as TeamCity GitFlow, and set build configuration name to Master. Now we have a new project with a build for the master branch changes.

Configure pipeline for Develop

Copy the Master configuration to create another one for develop branch.

Set the names as follow:

Make sure they have different VCS roots:

Configura pipelines for features and releases

Then create Features-Bugfixes build configuration by coping the Develop configuration; create Releases-Hotfixes build configuration by coping the Master configuration. We will have 4 build configurations as below.

Now the Features-Bugfixes and Develop share the same VCS root; Releases-Hotfixes and Master share the same VCS root.

Edit the vcs root for Features-Bugfixes. Change the VCS root name to https://github.com/qszhuan/teamcity-gitflow-integration.git#refs/heads/features-bugfixes, and edit the Branch specification as below. When click Save, there are two options: create a separate one or override the current one as it’s used in two places(Features-Bugfixes and Develop). choose to create a new one.

Edit the vcs root for Releases-Hotfixes. Change the VCS root name to https://github.com/qszhuan/teamcity-gitflow-integration.git#refs/heads/features-bugfixes, and edit the Branch specification as below. Finally we will get 4 vcs roots.

Disable default branch build for features and releases

The last step is to change the Version Control Settings to untick the Allow builds in the default branch option for Features-Bugfixes and Releases-Hotfixes.

Test and see the result

Now it’s done. Try to create feature branches or bugfix branches to check the CI pipelines. This is one sample:

Version Control settings

Now we have a skeleton config for Git flow. we can save the project configuration into a repo. so that we can reuse it to generate settings for other projects.

It’s better to create a separate repo to store the teamcity settings. If you are using TeamCity 2017 or later, you can store

git 3